"Project: Spiral" - Appendix

The following excerpts are taken from On the Nature of Humanity, and Its Various Features & Foibles, considered the authoritative introductory text regarding the sentient lifeforms of Third Earth.  While there are many and varied resources that are highly valued for their deep and comprehensive considerations, they can prove just as exhausting to read as they are exhaustive in their coverage.  To date, no single volume rivals On the Nature of Humanity in terms of pragmatic concision.

On the Sapient Peoples Native to Third Earth

Sapience on Third Earth is known to be a creation of the gods, may they rest in peace. While the origin of dragons is not known so well, as most dragons will not deign to discuss their history with humanity (and accounts differ radically among those who will), it is known that dragons as a species are born of another world.

The creation of humanity was provoked by the Third Godswar, which makes us all children of battle, and explains why so many facts about us can be distilled into single numbers so highly relevant to combat and other methods of conflict resolution. While the dead gods and their long-ago wars are beyond the strictest scope of this work, a brief synopsis shall do:

• The First Godswar.  Long before humans walked the Earth, there was not even an Earth, or space, or time.  During this eternal “Once Before All Time,” the Ethereal Stream flowed directly into the Howling Void, with no intermediary between creation and destruction.  From that Timeless Before was born Flux, god of change, who desired space and time to move and live: and so they changed the Universe, creating the Mortal Coil between the Ethereal Stream and the Howling Void.  As an equal and opposite reaction to this was born Deleo, god of nothingness, which of course opposed Flux and their creation. The shape and nature of the Mortal Coil was shaped by the opposition between Flux and Deleo:  as they pushed creation down from the Stream, it pulled everything down into the Void; it was always seeking to undo whatever they had done. Many gods were created by Flux, corrupted by Deleo, and destroyed in battle during this conflict.  The First Godswar was finally ended when Flux sacrificed themself, grasping Deleo and then giving into its pull down to the Void, taking it with them. And so Flux and Deleo ceased to be, but from this conflict was born the Universe as we know it and the first gods.
• The Second Godswar.  After the existence of the Mortal Coil was more or less secured for the foreseeable future, the gods almost immediately set to squabbling with each other (and, it seems, we are only too perfectly made in their image).  During the first war, there had been many gods of fire created, many gods of dust, many gods of water, and so on. They battled each other for supremacy, until one of the gods of inspiration realized that the Universe was a big place and there was no reason that all the gods had to live in one world together.  And so they split up, some alone, many in pairs, most in groups, and went to various different worlds, and they grew the darkness between the stars so that they might never need see each other again if they did not wish to do so.
• The Third Godswar.  There have undoubtedly been other godswars on other worlds, but the Third Godswar of which we on Third Earth are aware is the one between gods and dragons.  After the dragons arrived and crashed our worlds together, they made war on the gods in pursuit of power. Mighty as the gods were, the dragons were too numerous and cunning; and so the gods made humans to be even more numerous and cunning still, in order to turn the tables on the dragons.  While many thinkers have since remarked that “do it back but more” is not the most sophisticated strategy, it was certainly effective, and the dragons were driven back to the Rept Isles which remained their home until the fall of the Graylocks.

And so it came to pass that from the nigh-perpetual conflicts of deities were the first humans born. We are the spit and image of the gods, their substance and likeness; each of us contains but a fraction of the gods’ true power, yet the full range of their virtues and vices.

Humans

While the various human races may appear in certain respects to be wholly different from one another, all humanity is united by a single commonality: the ability to interbreed with other human races. Thus, in a strong sense, all humans are of a single species and race. However, the biological differences between the various “races” (or perhaps “breeds” could be more accurate) are of such visibility and persistence that they may be spoken of with some considerable reliability.

Do keep in mind that these statistical observations represent general trends; by and large, more difference exists within these groups than between them, as all share the same basic body plan, intellectual capacity, range of emotion, and so on. One may find, with only a little searching, a troll who has more in common with an elf than most other trolls, and mutatis mutandis for all other interracial comparisons.

Dwarves:  Stewards of the Below

The stout and hardy dwarves were created by Imus, god of deep places and hidden value, to find important resources from below-ground and bring them to the surface. As a result of this original purpose, dwarves often find themselves called to be artificers, engineers, and technomancers, taking great fulfilment in creating and implementing solutions to acquisition problems. Because they were made to work in tight quarters, usually underground, they are correspondingly possessed of low-slung frames and compact features. While dwarves do a great deal of work underground, few indeed actually make their dwelling underground, with the exception of the fairly common underhill homes - which are so ubiquitous among humans, and close to the surface anyway, as to practically erase the distinction. Many a child has stumbled upon what they thought to be an ancient dwarven ruin, lost to civilization, only to have their hopes dashed by a more knowledgeable parent or teacher who reveals it to be simply an old mine that everyone knows about.

It is a common misconception that dwarves are slower or less nimble than the other human races, owing to their short stature and cautious demeanor. On the contrary, when properly motivated (say, by an imminent cave-in or other life-threatening development), dwarves are capable of keeping pace with any elf or orc - what’s more, they are also able to turn tight corners at high running speeds owing to their lower center of gravity. However, dwarves typically choose not to move at their top speed, on account of the careful movements needed to carry out sensitive earth-moving operations under a worrying amount of solid rock that grows increasingly precarious over the course of said operations.